“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Sayre, a community of about 7500, only 20 miles from Elmira and just across the Pennsylvania border, is my hometown. It’s loaded with memories for me. Jane and I also spent the first four years of our marriage here, before moving to Elmira in 1960. Laurel and I bought the house in Sayre, just around the corner from the house I grew up in, to get more living and working room. Now each time we make the beautiful drive to Elmira, it’s like moving back in time—just like it used to be when we traveled from Elmira to Sayre. And I speculate that Jane and Seth watch Laurel and me with much amusement now as we manipulate that quality called “time” on our journeys back and forth between the two houses…

But also, in my own book I’d want to write about my second marriage. Laurel Lee Davies, a native of Iowa, wrote to me from California after Jane’s death in September 1984, She was 29, I was 65. After months of letters and telephone calls we met in Elmira, and kept on developing the intuitive and loving relationship we had already begun. With our strong beliefs in the Seth material our ages and temperamental differences don’t seem to matter all that much. Laurel has been a marvelous help to me for all of the years we’ve been together, just as I’ve tried to help her. I’ve often thought, and hesitantly told her, that I think she saved me after Jane’s passing. And I add that Laurel and I were married at our home on Pinnacle Road in Elmira at 9:30 PM on December 31, 1999 - just in time for the new millennium.

And so the unification of more facets of the Seth material continues. I trust that I’m offering enough intriguing hints in this essay to keep readers interested in pursuing Jane’s and Seth’s and my loving work. Apropos of that statement, what’s left after publishing the deleted sessions? Well, how about the transcripts in book form of the ESP classes Jane conducted from 1967 to 1978? Rick Stack was one of her students, with friends often making the weekly 400-mile-plus round trip from New York City to our apartment in upstate Elmira, NY. (And the members of that group had to be back in the city to go to work the next day! Jane and I used to marvel at their endurance.) Rick recorded and has produced many audio tapes of Jane and Seth speaking in those classes; at this time he’s also producing an additional group of tapes. Then there’s Jane’s business and personal correspondence; much of her poetry; her journals; her unfinished autobiography; several novels she wrote before publishing the three Oversoul Seven books; the later essays she dictated to me, while in the hospital, about Seven’s childhood; her family history as far back as it can be researched; an objective biography of her physical and creative lives including her two marriages, and Jane’s and my struggles to survive before the advent of the Seth material. And there could be more; there always seems to be more, I’m glad to note.

[...] In 1963, Jane talked to a class conducted by Mr. Clauss, at Elmira College, subject poetry. The college connection arose recently, because Jane also applied for a teaching job there, as well as in the Elmira school system.

[...] Jane said this refers to the fact that in order to keep the job as a substitute teacher she must begin taking 6 credits a year at Elmira College, after she has taught a total of 40 school days. [...]

[...] Piccadilly Square, London, England, might refer to the fact that a professor at Elmira College, with whom Jane would like to work as an assistant, teaches English Literature and specializes in Victorian English. [...]

[...] In addition, the neighbor had just returned to Elmira from a trip to Ohio, so the Ohio thought was mentioned in the conversation more than once. [...]

However, if you and your wife ever get to Elmira, you know of course that you are welcome any time. [...]

Elmira, NY 14905

I want to emphasize here that the Steins, who are teachers of music, have been attracted to a home in Elmira that was owned for many years by a man who, as a merchant, had strong connections with music in general and pianos in particular. Mr. Stein, incidentally, teaches in Elmira — hence the decision by him and his wife to move here and so eliminate his workday traveling between Sayre and Elmira.

(Now these notes hark back to the end of the 732nd session, when I wrote a paragraph concerning Sue Watkins, our longtime friend who attends class as often as she can these days from the small town where she now lives, some 35 miles north of Elmira. [...] One of the reasons for my failure to settle the matter right away was the lack of any immediate pressure to do so, for we hadn’t seen Sue since before the 729th session was held; that’s over five weeks ago now; newspaper work has often kept her too busy to make the trip to Elmira.

The second house (on Foster Avenue in Elmira) was owned for years by the people who gave it its character. [...]

[...] Years ago (in 1964), you were interested in another house (also in Elmira); again, it had been owned by an artist. [...]

(This unexpected little session was Jane’s first upon our returning to Elmira, NY from Marathon, FL. [...]

[...] When we reached Troy, Pennsylvania, yesterday afternoon, some twenty-four miles south of Elmira, Jane told me she felt revitalized suddenly.)

(Student Bill Herriman is a professional pilot who flies a considerable distance to Elmira for class; his counterpart in class, Carl Jones, lives in Elmira each summer while giving instructions in sailplane flying, the third member of the counterpart trio, Bill Granger, is not a member of class, lives in Elmira, has always had a deep interest in aircraft, and is now learning to pilot sailplanes. [...]

(John also wanted to call to Jane’s attention a news item in the Elmira paper for Aug. [...] The story was largely a refutation of an article concerning drugs in Elmira, published by a national tabloid, the National Mirror. Ironically, while Elmira authorities were denying this story, there appeared in the column next to it an item detailing the theft of a doctor’s black bag, containing narcotics, from the doctor’s car in one of the local hospital parking lots. [...]

(It seems that last night John, while eating in a restaurant with a friend we do not know, was informed by this friend that the Elmira police had taken into custody a man who had been making the rounds of the Elmira pharmacies with a forged prescription for narcotics. [...]

(This morning while I was at work, John Bradley stopped by briefly while on a hurried business trip to give Jane some information relating to a prediction of a narcotics scandal that Seth had predicted for Elmira in the 63rd session, of June 17. [...]

(I am also filing an item from the Thursday Elmira paper, dealing with another attempt to use a forged prescription in drug stores in Corning, N.Y., about ten miles distant. [...]

(Just before we sat for the session Jane finished reading my account of my “light of the universe” experience of last Sunday evening, September 21, and my account of the experience involving … clairvoyance … precognition … that I’d had at naptime today, involving my idea for a novel and an article in tonight’s Star-Gazette, Elmira’s daily newspaper. [...]

I thought of myself as a woman at the mall in Big Flats, near Elmira. [...]

I do not know how or when the two look-a-like young men met — but in my reverie I thought of the mother in question tracing back connections all the way to her son’s birth at the Elmira hospital. [...]

[...] Either way, she finds out through much detective work that a whole series of mixups had occurred in the hospital that day — that in the Elmira area there are several sets of parents who have been raising the wrong children all these years. [...]

Elmira.

(“State Street in Elmira?”)

(This afternoon I had delivered to our landlord’s supper club, here in Elmira, four large oil paintings which we mounted on the club walls. [...]

[...] Bill is in the process, incidentally, of moving out of his parents’ home and into a studio and apartment in downtown Elmira, where he is going to live and at the same time maintain an art gallery. [...]

(Today Jane and I spent several discouraging hours driving through and around Elmira, inspecting homes that were for sale. [...] Then, as we were passing through the outskirts of West Elmira late in the afternoon, I spontaneously turned onto an avenue that we’d first traveled on February 4.

[...] I am telling you that of the [Elmira] houses in your mind it really makes little difference which one you choose. [...]

[...] We sent the notice not only because of Seth’s material in the session, but because we felt that on our own we’d intuitively resolved a certain probable course of action — just as we’d done concerning the house on Foster Avenue in Elmira. [...]

[...] Jim and Debbie and Winter and Theresa left for the Holiday Inn in Elmira, New York, 15 miles across the Pennsylvania border. [...] Then back down into the city and to the campus of Elmira College. [...] Not surprisingly it was locked, but still easy to inspect—and also to just accept as the people of Elmira and those in the college went about their daily activities. [...]

The Butts family does have a bit of history in Elmira, though. [...] In the last two decades of the 1800s my grandfather Otis and his wife raised four children on their farm in Wellsboro, PA, a farming community some 50 miles from Elmira, New York. [...] After Jay and Ella had each married they settled in Elmira. [...]

My parents lived briefly in Elmira, and then moved to Sayre in 1923 after having traveled to California. Hardly strange, then, that I found work as an artist in Elmira, and that Jane and I moved there in 1960, five years after our marriage. I still have third-and-fourth generation relatives in Elmira, although I’m not close to them. [...]

[...] Out of all of the apartments for rent in Elmira, why had Jane chosen that one? [...] She came to Elmira with me after I’d begun working for the greeting-card company, Artistic, to look for a place for us so we could move from Sayre and save the time and expense of commuting 30 miles a day, five days a week. [...]

[...] Our gravesite is not in Elmira. [...]

Robert F. Butts
Elmira, New York
September 1997

[...] Somewhere in the conversation, with a smiling sense of wonder, he told us what had happened as he drove through Elmira on the way to our house.

[...] She was walking on the sidewalk, and sure enough, it was the same girl I’d met at a bar during my first trip to Elmira. [...]

[...] Remember that the Kecks were called long distance in Brooklyn, NY, from Elmira, by the Arnot Gallery before they made the trip to Elmira to do conservation work, for instance.

[...] Could also be a generalization, referring to either the Arnot Gallery here in Elmira, or the Brooklyn Museum mentioned on the object, or both.

[...] The Kecks are well known in their field, and it is possible some social affair was held for them while they were in Elmira and at the gallery doing their work. [...]

(The word “museum" has historical connotations, and the Kecks deal with old paintings, often of historic interest, so Jane is correct when she asserts that old paintings such as those the Kecks handled while in Elmira in August 1964, are also historical events.

[...] Sayre, PA is 18 miles from Elmira, NY and is my home town. [...]

[...] This, all after we’ve found a suitable place and have sold our house in Elmira on 1730 Pinnacle Road. [...]

(A note by R.F.B.: Jane had formally ended her ESP classes by March 1975, when we moved from our downtown apartments in Elmira, New York, to the hill house at the edge of the city. [...]

The Way Toward Health is more than an account of the stay — and death — of my wife, Jane Roberts, in a hospital in Elmira, New York, just 13 years ago. [...]

Robert F. Butts
Elmira, New York
September 1997

Elmira.

(“Frank Watts, do you have any children living in Elmira now?”)

(“Here in Elmira?”)

Locally, there were some general beliefs held: The Elmira region was economically depressed and considered to be in a backwash area of the state of New York, yet the condition was not bad enough for crisis aid. [...]

[...] The [Chemung] river was close by, directly in the heart of the business section [of Elmira], for example.

[...] Yet the college [Elmira College] still found itself with many of the dispossessed needy at its doorstep. [...]

(Before I typed this material from my notes, Jane and I discussed whether we should supplement Seth’s rather generalized local data with specific names, dates, and events involving Elmira and Chemung County; this information would cover periods of at least several months before and after the flood of June 23, 1972. [...]